A WordPress checkout that had stopped closing.
Rebuilt, migrated, and live in ten days.
Electroweld is one of the largest welding and industrial suppliers in Australia — machines, consumables, abrasives, PPE, power tools, moving through a deep catalogue to retail buyers and trade accounts. The site had been stitched together on WordPress and had stopped keeping up. Checkout wasn't reliably closing orders, and the quote to rebuild it properly ran to six months.
Where the site had stopped keeping up
The storefront was running — products listing, categories navigating — but the pipeline the buyer walked through to place an order wasn't reliably closing. Every drop at checkout was a missed invoice, and the team had been watching it happen.
The conversation they'd had locally was the standard one. A custom rebuild, quoted at somewhere around twenty thousand Australian dollars on a six-month timeline — the low end of what Australian agencies quote for a job like this.
The Electroweld team isn't technical. They weren't in a position to unpack why a catalogue website should take half a year to build, and they didn't especially want to be. They wanted a site customers could check out of.
What the local agencies were quoting, though, wasn't a brochure site. The brief, once you wrote it out, was a full retail-and-B2B e-commerce platform sharing one inventory — the kind of build a six-month timeline is, to the agencies' credit, a reasonable estimate for.
The storefront side
Smart search runs across the full catalogue. Typo tolerance, SKU lookup, autocomplete, and product-and-category matching in the same result set. A search for welder surfaces machines and related consumables on the same page. Customers who used to hit a dead end on the old site finish the order.
Product pages carry the weight a trade product carries. Large primary image, side gallery, embedded videos, downloadable manuals, a prominent SKU, bulk pricing tables where applicable, and a price-beat request form — the customer submits a competitor's price, the Electroweld team reviews it manually, the conversation stays on the platform. Spare parts are linked as first-class products from the parent product page, so a customer on a welding machine lands on the matching consumables without going back to search.
Homepage merchandising — hero video, video-based category tiles for the six primary categories, a Products in Action video carousel with product cards attached, admin-curated featured rows, a blog section, the Welding Wednesday newsletter signup — runs under admin control. No developer in the loop when the homepage needs to change.
The trade account
Trade customers log in to their own side of the storefront. Negotiated pricing applies automatically — either a standard percentage across the catalogue or special pricing on specific items, designated per customer by admin.
Quick reorder lifts any past order straight into a new cart, so the consumables that go out on a regular cycle don't start from search every time. Volume-based pricing tiers apply to everyone on threshold. Account credits — from refunds or admin-gifted — are visible at checkout and applied against the order total. Pay-on-account, invoiced on thirty-day terms, is available to eligible customers; admin toggles it per account.
ElectroBucks sits on top of all of it. Points per dollar spent, redeemable against future orders, with progress bars, milestone rewards, and a rewards dashboard in the customer account. Bonus-point promotions route through the Welding Wednesday newsletter.
What the team runs it from
The admin panel is where the non-technical half of the team spends the day. Products created, edited, categorised, and tagged. Bulk pricing rules. Clearance tagging. Free-express-shipping flags that surface as a badge on the product and listing pages. Discount codes. Wholesaler and bulk-buyer designations per customer. Account credits added and adjusted inline. Price-beat submissions routed to a review queue.
Every product carries a cost price. A profit margin calculator — visible only to admin roles, hidden from every other user type — renders the margin percentage and profit per unit inline on the product page. Bulk pricing tiers are edited in the same view: min quantity, max quantity, unit price, saving per unit, saving percentage.
Underneath: PostgreSQL, Cloudflare R2 for media, Stripe for card / Apple Pay / Google Pay and bank transfer, Google Maps Places for address autocomplete, Resend for transactional email and receipts, QuickBooks for order and invoice syncing.
Two days, and then ten
The platform itself shipped in two days. The rest of the window was the migration — the full WordPress catalogue, the product data, the media, the customer accounts, the SEO URLs — lifted onto the new system without dropping the search rankings the old site had earned. Ten days in, Electroweld was live on it.
The team had never worked this way before, and they said so.
The team went above and beyond to implement every feature we requested, even when requirements changed. Customer-specific pricing, analytics, bulk uploads — the platform is incredibly flexible for our needs. High-quality work, delivered on time.
Why six months was the reasonable quote
The Australian agencies weren't wrong about what it takes to build this properly. A search layer that handles typos and SKUs and categories in one pass, a B2B portal carrying negotiated pricing and quick reorder and account credits and pay-on-account, a gamified loyalty system, an admin panel the non-technical team actually runs the business from, and a catalogue migration that keeps SEO intact — these are a six-month build through a normal shop. Creatr ships the software in two days and spends the rest of the time on the data. That's the difference.
Back to real products built